Starting to minecraft – a woman’s perspective

A couple weeks ago I was infected with a kind of virus that seems to be circulating in this online world in general and in my immediate peergroup in particular. My infection happened to coincide with a „real“ bodily illness, that prevented me1 from leaving my bed but not from using my hands and thus operating my computer. And, as I had read about this highly enjoyable and versatile game in some blog posts recently (here and here – disclaimer: these posts are written in German), I decided to try it out just to kill a bit of time. Well… the time killing seemed to work all too well. I had barely even started to manage without beeing converted into a zombie’s breakfast or being blown to bits and pieces by a creeper when I realised it was getting dark out (and by out I mean outside in that other world that is not minecraft) and I had not eaten breakfast nor lunch. That realisation however did not, as you might expect, induce me to put aside my dedicated minecraft device and find some „real“ food in the „real“ world. Instead I „just wanted to finish up my project…“ before getting something to eat. A few hours later… had not my heartsperson brought me some food and forced me to eat up, I probably would have gone without nourishment that day.

To cut a long and obviously not unheard of story short: I have been spending a lot of time playing minecraft since and I have enjoyed it tremendously2. I have however been bothered by one thing: For some reason that eludes me the game seemed to assume, that I was a dude or at least, that I didn’t mind running around the world as a dude. And since I didn’t have much of a choice3 that’s what I did for the first few days. But, well, I actually did mind. I am not a dude nor do I usually choose to be percieved as such, so having this male appearance (and identity, since the default player’s name is „Steve“) forced upon me kinda annoyed me. I would have preferred having a neutral name and a more neutral appearence when starting out.

As it was, I was forced to customize my player skin and since I’m not much of an artist, I tried to find a suitable skin online, that I could utilize. I was not looking for anything fancy, just a very basic skin, much like „Steve“ but without the beard and maybe with a bit more feminine hair. Boy, was I dissapointed. Every female skin I found was „prettied up“ with make-up and „sexy“ clothes, meaning short pants and lowcut tops or even just some kind of weird squarekini. Some didn’t wear any clothes at all. So, this was to be my choice? Run around as dude or be the „sexy lady“? Thanks, but no thanks. So, I went ahead and tried to create my own skin by mashing up Steve with a naked lady (nope, no kinky stuff!) and doing a little tweaking here and there. This is the result:

Front and Back View

I don’t know if I want to keep this look indefinitely4, but for now it works fine. Only took me a few hours, that I could have spent playing, if I had been what seems to be the default: a dude. We do, after all, live in a dude’s world.

If anyone should want to use this skin, feel free. Here you go:

EDIT: As soon as I had published this post, I began to be unsatisfied with this version, so I kept tweaking and fiddling and now there is a revised Verson:

Front and Back View

And here’s the new skin file:

EDIT II: This post by Minecraft’s original developer Notch states, that he regrets having „named“ the character Steve and thereby creating_encouraging it’s percepion as the „Mincraft Guy“. (While I appreciate this statement, it still doesn’t change the above described experience though.)